The real question is, what is the long term impact to productivity and work flow? Sure you can save money up front by switching to a different software suite but that doesn't matter if it disrupts your business in a significant way. Before the shouting starts I'm not implying that there is anything wrong. I'm would like to see an actual study done to determine the effect.

That argument is a load of crap. Just take a look at every major war fought in the last hundred years. Sure a superior military might conquer and occupy for a while but if the local people aren't on board with it the occupation almost always fails with very few exceptions.

Your argument also relies on the assumption that the majority of those in the armed forces would follow orders to attack civilians. There would be plenty that would disobey that order.

A rebellion by citizen with firearms, even semiautomatic, would give them enough of an edge to take some military bases and upgrade. Especially if they were dissenting military personnel helping in those campaigns.

There, I fixed that for you.

Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my passport. Verify Me.

Coincidentally you'll never get any action from a vagina either. Some of us have a girlfriend or are married and watch movies with our significant others, some of which they choose. Feel free to pop your head up out of the basement and ask your mom if you need to verify this practice.

When I read that I nearly destroyed my work laptop with the water I was drinking.

There are, but don't worry, the things that aren't covered by terrorism are covered under 'think of the children!'

I think you've missed a their most recent strategy/mission statements. The aren't focusing on what the PC can do anymore. They want to become a device/ cloud services company. They want to be more like Apple and Google, device and cloud strategy wise.

You're confusing quality of a product with putting a product, that is just good enough to meet the need, out there in front of an emerging trend. That is what Bill Gates was much better at doing while he was CEO. Ballmer almost always misses the mark on putting the right product out, even if it still needs more development, at the right moment.

We found a CEO, may we burn him?!?

All kidding aside he is not a great or even good leader. If he was half as effective as Bill Gates MS would have have only lost half of the product wars that it has. He has perpetually missed the boat on emerging trends, and then tried to chase the boat down in a runabout with a 5HP outboard motor.

I'm sorry but you've obviously never had a front-line tech support position. I have provide tech support to several thousand individuals at this point in my career. I would be more than comfortable saying that at least 70% of smart phone users have no idea what version the OS of their phone is. They simply don't care, as long as their apps load. If a feature is missing they are often oblivious unless a tech savy friend, commercial, or corp IT support person tells them about it. They don't think about security consequences, how protocol enhancements can affect their life, what added enhancements they might be missing out on, no not one bit.

Sit outside Worst Buy sometime and do a random survey asking people what OS version they have on their phone. You'll quickly discover how unaware/uninterested they are.

The real reason they want to make a park on the moon is so they can setup a gun free zone that actually has zero crime.

Those labs are fun for a quickie, like a short test drive, but if you want to do anything more serious than take it for a spin around the block you're out of luck now. This will seriously hamper the ability of IT professionals to do any meaningful research on MS product offerings. My $350 subscription has netted them an extra 10 grand in revenue last year alone. I'm paying for the ability to test drive their products, which is in their best interests, and they think that taking that tool away is no big deal. They are seriously mistaken.

You mean other than the fact that it costs considerably more for the MSDN subscription to get the same level of service. I went and looked at their free technet downloads and found the selection lacking, considerably. They only put in the main products so if I want to practice with MDT, MDOP, or any number of other smaller expansion packs I have to go with a much more expensive MSDN subscription. That complaint is secondary only to the fact that I can't do anything complicated with what is available because the trial times are all different for each product they have posted up. So I get my VM environment set up with a domain cluster and then want to try standing up SCCM, WDS, MDT and PKI to learn how to manage that kind of a setup I can't do it anymore. The system expires before I ever get close to setting up any kind a robust lab. If you're just doing a few one off labs like the ones you find in the exam prep books then this strategy might be fine for you. However, for those of us that use it to really get familiar with the products, this is hugely limiting. We either have to spend thousands more a year or we just have to rebuild our labs every time the trial expires, which will be a huge headache.

I hope a good tech witch comes and puts a spell on Ballmer that makes him shit Windows 8 brick phones until he learns to listen to customers.

Can it detect my apathy?